Tuesday, October 11, 2016

The French lady Jeanne Calment [1875-1997], who lived in Arles, holds the current world record for longevity : 122 years. But old age records are not exactly rocket science, and older contenders may have existed, or continue to exist, for this record.

Jean-Louis Serre, a French professor of genetics, wonders here whether it might be impossible for humans to live any longer than that.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Normally, nobody's going to know the bare facts (unless I get struck down dead in the near future... which is not one of my current intentions). So I'm obliged to write this blog post. I've just ordered (through the Internet) no less than four items of relatively expensive black underwear, of the celebrated Eminence brand, made in France.

Before ordering, I even went to the trouble of phoning up the factory down in the Gard department to find out the identity of distributors who sell their genuine made-in-France production... and they gave me immediately a single famous name: Galeries Lafayette.

Now, if you think that the tone of my underwear story is somewhat overkill, that simply means that you've never had an opportunity of seeing me wandering around the house at Gamone, of an early morning, dressed in nothing more than cheap underwear purchased at the local Leclerc supermarket. Normally, I'm not an exhibitionist, but wearers of cheap supermarket underwear are obliged to become exhibitionists, unwittingly, through what the French refer to as la force des choses (literally, the force of things)... which means, in the present case, the force of hefty male genitalia striving constantly to fray their way through flimsy fabrics manufactured in places like Bangladesh.

Once upon a time, when I was a young fellow, we could buy clothes that lasted for ages. I remember, for example, having once tossed out, with iron in my soul, an archaic pair of moleskin trousers that I had brought with me from Sydney in 1962, because they had ceased to fit my bulky form several decades ago. They were manufactured by a legendary Australian firm named Fletcher Jones. This manufacturer still exists, but I have no idea whether they've adhered (probably not) to the fabulous fabrics of my youth. During my trip to Sydney in 2006, I asked the staff in a Fletcher Jones shop whether they still sold moleskin trousers, and they looked at me as if I were a Martian. These days, it's such a temptation to make money by using shitty fabrics from Bangladesh.

When I speak of being a "good citizen", I merely mean that I intend to purchase systematically, as far as possible, products that are made in France.

About Me

After working in various computing jobs, I retired to an old farm property in the Vercors mountain range, on the edge of the French Alps, where I spend my time writing, playing with the Internet and looking out upon the slopes in the company of my dog Fitzroy, admiring wonders created by the Big Bang and Evolution.